Leaving and transmitting messages has been a common act in daily lives. Some common approaches include leaving a written note, e-mails, telephone message and answering machines. In this type of application, the message leaver is usually different from the message receiver. Another type of application, such as, calendar or electronic calendar, is to remind oneself by, such as, leaving oneself a message. In either application, the contents of message are usually not events for immediate attention; therefore, the message receiver may forget to handle the message accordingly. Or, in some cases, the message receiver cannot receive the message because of the location restriction. In any case, the failure to receive the message or to act upon the message is considered as a big disadvantage, and thus a solution must be devised.
This type of leaving and transmitting messages may also be used in home care system, such as, reminding the elderly of taking medicine and the school kids for doing homework. The integration of the leaving and transmitting messages feature into household robot is another new application. Integrated into robot, the leaving and transmitting message feature may further enhance the effectiveness of home care system.
There are conventional technologies of leaving and transmitting speech messages disclosed. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,324,261 disclosed a hardware structure for recording and playing speech messages. In collaboration with sensors, the disclosed technology operates by pressing hardware buttons. The disclosed technology does not perform any message analysis or recombination, and is not actively playing. U.S. Pat. No. 7,327,834 disclosed a message transmission system having communication capability, where the operation requires the user to clearly define the recipient, date, time, event message and transmission message, and so on.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,394,405 disclosed a system for providing location-based notifications. As shown in FIG. 1, in a car 102 installed with a notification system, the operation requires the user to input header information 104 to define notification type, expiration date, importance and speech recording 106, and with the collaboration with a location detection device, such as, GPS, to determine the location of the input device of the notification. When the location of the input device and location 110 of the transmitting notification is within a threshold 108, a notification is transmitted.
China Patent Application No. 200610124296.3 disclosed an intelligent speech recording and reminding system based on speech recognition technology. As shown in FIG. 2, the system comprises a speech receiving module 210, a system control module 220, and a speech output module 230. Based on predefined rules, the system performs speech recognition on the speech signals issued by the user to determine whether the speech is a control speech or a message speech, and performs personalization processing on the speech data and transmits to the user in order to achieve the functions of direct speech control, leaving message, calendar and appointment reminding. In operation, the speech between the two control speeches, i.e., start leaving message and stop leaving message, is the message speech.
Taiwan Patent No. 1242977 disclosed a speech calendar system. As shown in FIG. 3, speech calendar system 300 comprises an internet server 311, a computer telephony integrated server 312, and a speech synthesized server 313. Servers 311, 312, 313 are all connected to a communication network 31. Speech calendar system 300 is able to process the message transmission between the internet and the telephony network. Internet server 311 is connected to Internet 32 for processing communication between Internet user 34 and system 300, such as, e-mails. The e-mail includes a calendar event, and the calendar event includes a message notification and a time setting, where the message notification may be text message, pre-recorded audio file or synthesized audio file from a text message. The audio file may be played in telephony network 33. Computer telephony integrated server 312 is connected to telephony network 33 for processing the telephony response of telephony network user 35 and system 300.
In summary, the above techniques mostly require the user to input the message and information, such as, receiver, date, time, event message and transmission message according to predefined rules, or alternatively to use speech recognition to input speech message according to predefined rules.